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Proposal 2 would have created constitutional protection for public-sector bargaining in Michigan. Passage in that state seems like it would have been a no-brainer -- except that it didn't pass, and it didn't pass by a relatively wide margin. Dennis Nolan flagged the last Wedensday as one as worth blogging about, but the usual folks I might go to in Michigan to explain what had happened were at a loss.

We share organized labor's anger at Republicans who want to make unions the scapegoats for decades of municipal mismanagement. But we also understood that, at the end of the day, Proposal 2 was designed to erect a firewall not just against labor's opponents, but against the democratic process itself.

And we reasoned that, in an era when the pie is shrinking for most Michiganders, the notion that anyone's share should be protected by constitutional armor was simply unfair to everyone else.

Barry Goldman suggests that perhaps Proposal 2 was defeated because "(a) No is the default vote, (b) the vote really meant a pox on both your houses."